My Withered Legs and Other Essays is a collection of personal essays by Sandra Gail Lambert that reflects upon her experience becoming a writer alongside discussions of disability, queerness, and aging. A seventy-year history of disability is threaded throughout these essays and intertwined with writing that celebrates lesbian love, explores the slapstick moments of life, and shares the obstacles and triumphs of becoming a writer later in life.
The essays chronicle times of interruption and then adaptation as the disability skill of always just figuring it out becomes tested with age and with illness. Throughout the book, Lambert engages with topics of ageism and ableism through storytelling rich with wit and contemplation.
From childhood Lambert believed as a disabled person she was “ice floe material” rife for abandonment, and during the pandemic she ticks off the additional comorbidities—age, fatness, cancer, a heart attack—that groups her with the expendable. In the essay ‘Gimp Humor, ‘ she is threatened with a ticket for not coming to a full stop while strolling along in her wheelchair. Underpinning the humor is an analysis of whiteness and the wariness that can be lodged, or not, in a body.
Other essays reimagine the meaning of ‘Old Lady Dabbler, ‘ recount kayaking among a hundred alligators, and tell the romantic, laden-with-power-dynamics tale of two lesbians in their sixties who fall in love. Another essay explores the family story, truth embellished with fiction, of Lambert’s mother finding an unexploded bomb nestled in her parents » bed. This tale of the London Blitz delves into the increasingly common experience of ’emergence’ after a disaster and the necessity of becoming, especially for marginalized communities, our own first responders.
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